Man-Kzin Wars XI, Hal Colbatch [story books to read .txt] 📗

Fanged God will give them a new and greater life. Have I simplified your theology?"

"Yes," said Dimity and Vaemar together.

"I had no idea of a god," said the Protector. "In the caves there was Hunger. Eating. Hatred. Fear. Mating. Enemy-prey. Thoughts moved sluggishly but emotions surged. Then enemy-preys. All danger. All food. Old preys. The flyers and the runners. New enemy-preys. Things like you and you, that killed and killed. Killed like the water flooding the lower tunnels, with things that blinded and burnt. The big ones were hard to kill, the small ones were hard to kill too. I survived. I knew almost nothing but survival and breeding. Those about me died, for your kinds killed them and then you killed the flyers and other things that were our food. That was all. That, and a dim idea that something had sent our food to us, and made the waters flow.

"Then, after the Change, I began to wonder who had made the caves—the caves that I thought then were the world. Then, when the light burnt less outside, I left the caves. I saw what I now know is the scarp, sweeping down to the great valley. The sound of what I know is wind. Smells I had never imagined. I saw what I now know are the stars. Something had made this. It could not exist without a cause. Since then I have come to understand other concepts. Worship . . . I need to know much more . . . so much more."

It went on for a long time. It spoke with them of the creation of stars, and the physics of the Big Bang and the Monobloc, theories discarded with new knowledge in the twenty-second century, and resurrected with newer knowledge in the twenty-fourth. They tried to divert it. Finally it left them.

* * *

"No time to get her to kzin facilities. She'll have to stay with us," Guthlac said. "I'm not leaving her here with these gonzos." There had been tense hours while they waited for the ship to arrive.

"I agree," said Cumpston. "But will she make it?"

"She's a kzinrret. She's tough."

"We don't have a kzin autodoc."

"Her main problem's loss of blood. We've got some universal plasma. It won't carry oxygen but it'll give her heart something to work on and stop her blood vessels collapsing."

"Can you give it to her?"

"I had infantry combat training, a long time ago, including first aid. Never thought then that I'd be using it on a kzin, though. And my men are versatile. Wait till you try Albert's recipe for the wedding punch! Looking after a very important kzinrret shouldn't be too much for them."

"Now to find our missing pair."

Guthlac wiped his forehead. "They're alive," he said at last.

He pointed to the screen before him. A ship could be stealthed, but, at least for a time, its passage through atmosphere could not. "That could be the trace of the ship."

"It could be." The instrumentation showed a faint trail of atmospheric disturbance, dissipating as they watched.

"If that's a ship, it's got the best cloaking I've ever seen. Beyond the atmosphere there will be no way to follow it."

"We are looking for Protectors. Rykermann thinks the Hollow Moon was the original Protector ship. Could they be heading for it?"

Guthlac punched numbers. "It gives us somewhere to start looking," he said.

"I've got them," he said at last. "Extreme range, and there's interference, but that's where they are." He turned to Albert Manteufel, his pilot. "Take her up!"

* * *

"Gnosticism . . ." said Vaemar thoughtfully. "You said it is the idea of man becoming a god through his own inner efforts, or having a secret piece of god-ness inside him . . ." The Protector had gone, leaving them together in what they were coming to think of as "their" room.

"I think that's what it means," said Dimity. "Salvation by knowledge. Gnostics were 'people who knew,' and therefore spiritually superior beings. Perhaps a sort of race-memory of the Breeder-Protector cycle. But as I said, I'm not a theologian. The abbot once told me that almost all serious heresies are forms of gnosticism. He also said that, given that the universe had been created, it didn't matter much in religious terms where Man came from biologically, what mattered was where we were going spiritually."

"That Protector would seem to justify this gnosticism," said Vaemar. "A being turning into a god."

"I don't think so," said Dimity. "The kzinti wouldn't say that, would they?"

"No. Our souls go to the Fanged God, and are devoured by Him after a good hunt."

"And that's the end? It sounds rather bleak to a human."

"No. The souls of cowards are regurgitated into . . . well, the human word is Hell. The souls of Heroes go on somehow, but as it said we have only hints about that. It is a Mystery. But the hints are enough for us to have fought wars over them."

"And I don't think the abbot would say this is a case of beings turning into gods," said Dimity. "That thing is not a god, it is just a fast calculating machine . . . less human than a human, almost incapable of choice, almost without the advantages of limitation and imperfection. Mentally like me, only more so. As impaired as I am."

"No, Dimity, not like you."

"You are a chess master, Vaemar. Is it not true for you as for me that you come to some point in chess where you no longer seem to be moving the pieces, but rather watching them move."

"Yes, the moves become inevitable."

"Choice disappears. My life has been like that—watching equations become inevitable. As I think a Protector sees the world. I do not think this Protector sees it in such terms yet. But it will soon."

"Was it like that even when you were a cub . . . a child?"

"I got a lot of my memories back with being on Wunderland and with the treatments . . . I can say: